Hey, I'm new

Last year I took a computer programming class, half of the year we learned visual basic and the other half we learned JAVA. After that half a year of JAVA, I learned so much, from if statements, all the way to action listeners and GUI's. We used Jcreator at school, and it seems like everything was updated and installed. When I tried to install Jcreator on my computer, I had to download a bunch of classes(keyboard class... etc) and JDK's(supposedly something that allows you to run the program)? I was so confused and ended up uninstalling it from frustration. So can anyone give me a list of what I should download and where I should save the files?

ALSO: If you think there is a better IDE that's easier and less hassle please post that too=) thanks.

NOTE: I am running vista

Also it would be nice to know how you learned JAVA and what IDE's you used.

Get the JDK (available from Sun's site). It's got all you need, the JRE, compiler etc. As for custom classes, of course you need to download those if they're not part of the API. But if you just want to use the Keyboard class (why on earth do schools insist on teaching that crap?), use Java's own Scanner class instead.

As for IDE's to use, there's a sticky thread that'll hopefully help you out.